Literary Reflection

“Maybe you are searching among the branches, for what only appears in the roots,” Rumi states. When reading any type of literature just reading is not enough. Rumi states this looking at a general life, but when connecting it to literature, it is true. Do not just read, try to connect with the characters and look deeper at the settings and weather. In the short story, “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell, a hunter named Sanger Rainsford swims to Ship Trap Island “accidentally”. He comes upon another hunter there who is strange. This man is named Captain Zaroff. He is strange for two reasons. One, he believes hunting people is fun, and two he thinks of it as hunting and not murder. As Rainsford figures this out, he wants to escape the island. This is only possible if he can escape Zaroff in three days, which has never happened before. As people read the whole story, pages fly by and words go in and out through their ears. They are not able to understand and dig deeper into this short story. An informative literary analysis, How to Read Literature like a Professor: For Kids by Thomas C. Foster can help. Foster talks about the ways to dig deeper into a book and how to look through a character. In “The Most Dangerous Game” there is not just a plot, but another story, using How to Read Literature: For Kids will help the reader dig deeper into the story, seeing many things they have never seen before.

What goes through your mind when you read? Do you read deliberately, looking for certain aspects, or do you read as a blank slate? When reading, professors expect a deliberateness that will help you to uncover meanings that are not readily apparent. Thomas C. Foster in his book “How to Read Literature Like a Professor” expands on this concept. He endeavors to instruct his readers in the way he believes they should read, in order to get the most out of each book. He concedes that, “When lay readers encounter a fictive text, they focus, as they should, on the story and the characters” but to truly read like a professor you must also divert a portion of your attention on

Understanding great works of literature can be fairly difficult without the knowledge of analyzing them. How

The first big idea I found relevant was that literature has loads of concepts and connections that not every reader may notice. Foster wrote that once he realized that there were mushrooms in a forest that he couldn’t initially notice, his looking became “more focused and less vague” (Foster end of chapter 5). The same goes for both his and my reading. In my future readings, I plan to apply this concept by stopping at distinct parts and taking time ask myself “what does the author mean by that?” or “what is the author alluding to?”

plot and the message of the text or the characters in the story, monitoring the understanding of the

Throughout my educational career, I was taught to be critical, but not analytical to a great extend. In high school, I was never taught to think about why an author writes the way he or she intended. Rather, I was only to focus on the analysis of the novel, itself. However, this course has extended my knowledge in that it allows me to think how and why a novel is written the way it is. I also learned that every author has their own ways of communicating to the intended audience. They do so by manipulating pathos, ethos, and logos, which is the Rhetorical Triangle.

For the reasons stated in another post I made, with all the reading and writing that is required as a college student, added to the necessity of remembering everything just to get a passing grade in the classes, the last thing I want to do is read something heavy that requires thinking. For the near future anyway, I don't think I will find myself actually analyzing the stories I choose to read. There is enough other things I will be reading during my college years to have to analyze that I honestly don't see myself consciously changing my method of

Next, I will reflect on the effect of using the approaches we discussed above. This will be addressed in three main points: what does the literary lens that I used most often allow me to notice in literature, what are the drawbacks to using this lens so frequently, and how much my engagement with literature would’ve changed if I had used more of the intertextual lens that I used the least.

I have been practicing on how to improve my writing over the past few weeks, which has taught me a great deal about writing. My teacher would like me to evaluate and explain my strengths and weaknesses in my own writing. This evaluation is in between my two essays. One on my own and another with my teacher's help. I have strengths and weakness in my introduction, body paragraphs ,and my conclusion.

English is a hard language to learn, for there are numerous elements of effective usage and writing. Many people, including me, struggle in writing because of a lack of knowledge. Since middle school, English was not a strong suit of mine. I struggled with the simplest of tasks often taking a considerably longer time to complete a task than the other students. Unmotivated teachers and a lack of interest resulted in remedial writing skills. To put it simply, I had little confidence in my writing and I dreaded taking the class because of the writing involved. In spite of my fears, I took the course and I was able to perfect and challenge my mediocre writing skills.

We are already midway through the first quarter of my last year as a high school student. I find it hard to completely grasp how quickly this year is passing and yet I feel like we've already accomplished so much.

This semester, we have practiced several reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. Many of these that have helped me become a better writer this past semester. The readings, writings, and critical thinkings were not the only things that helped me become a better writer. I highly believe that the constructive criticism from yourself Professor Freeman is what helped the most. Every Time you graded a paper and left comments it pushed me to do better and improve on the next. So if I was to take anything to English 101/Composition 2 it would be a combination of determination to be better and all of my skills i’ve learned over this semester, such as outlines, organization, analyzing, and how to write a working thesis.

Over the years of learning, I always thought analyzing literature is just a simple summary of the storyline. Ever since I was in middle school I would automatically think that analyzing was to summarize because when it came to reading a book or any assignment, we would summarize it because we didn’t know what it meant. But during my years in high school, I finally learned what it was. I was taught that looking in deeper to find the meaning of the context and pay attention to every little detail when reading. Usually every week we would read books, poems, articles, or even watch movies and we would write down the characters, set, and plots. I would explain why the characters would act or feel a certain way if the setting wasn’t in a specific place then would the story still happen the same way as the original? This really increased my critical thinking.

Writing has always been something I dread. It’s weird because I love talking and telling stories, but the moment I have to write it all down on paper, I become frantic. It’s almost as if a horse race just begun in my mind, with hundreds of horses, or words, running through my mind, unable to place them in chronological order. Because I struggle to form satisfying sentence structure, it takes me hours, sometimes even days, to write one paper. It’s not that I think I’m a “bad writer,” I just get discouraged easily. Needless to say, I don’t think highly of my writing skills. When I was little I loved to both read and write. I read just about any book I could get my hands on, and my journal was my go to for my daily adventures. Although it’s

What concepts, principles, or ideas that you have learned, do you think you will remember the most after you leave this class?